“Nobody else to board? “ I was sitting in the plane, which should bring me to Mallorca, the island in the mediterean sea, which is at least in Germany and the UK well known for its crowded beaches and drunken Tourists singing their roaring songs. If you take a cheap flight from Frankfurt to Palma, you would expect to sit in a plane stuffed with drunken soccer teams. But not so today. The aircraft was nearly half e, next to me and my buddy rob was nobody to sit. We don’t really questioned that, were happy about the extra space and fell asleep. So that was the first real surprise on that trip. As it turned out, there were more to come.
My friend rob and I have done such trips a few times, and it has always been a great experience, combining outdoor activities with landscape photography. As we both have a full time job which has nothing to do with photography, it is always hard for us to find a date, so this year it fell into the beginning of November. .
When we tried to check in to our hotel in Pollenca, we had the second surprise: It’s 10 AM, but nobody was there. Seriously, nobody! Not even a sign or anything. Luckily, there was a construction worker near to the hotel, who surprisingly had a key for the front door. He told us to take any room we want, the owner of the hotel has spoken to him. That really felt strange! However, we took a room, and even as we did not expect to have any services at all in this empty facility, at the next morning there was somebody who prepared us some breakfast.
We had planned to be as much outside in the nature as possible and to avoid the strongholds of tourism, so we did our thing: Wake up early, walking though absolute dark mountains to catch the light of a sunrise, and we were really happy with all the circumstances. But on a small island like Mallorca, it is absolutely impossible not to get in touch with those strongholds. So whilst on the search for a great pier on a sand beach, we finally entered those areas. And, totally unexpected, those areas were absolute empty. I mean really empty! Not a single soul around. And this really made it interesting! There was an amazing atmosphere, to see all the big hotels, tiny cafes, beaches, shops and so on in the middle of the Winter-off-Season. It felt like a Ghost-Town. There was no question, cameras out and start shooting! Although this was not the intention of this trip, I mean, you could hardly say, that this is landscape photography, but the atmosphere banned us so much, it was impossible not to shoot it.
We went through tiny little streets in the shadows of those big hotels, we hopped from one closed café to the next, everywhere chairs on staples and tables upside down. There was a perfect symmetry of those big complexes, which appeared to us like sleeping giants. Balcony after balcony, a lost chair here, an empty towel holder there. A highlight was an empty teacteacup on a table surrounded by a few moved chairs, which looked like there has been a crowd sitting around it, but there was nobody in sight.
Another beautiful site was a pier, where in the summer time boats are arriving, with a lonely peaceful sign without letters, pointing in two different directions, placed between the sky and the sea. Mallorca really looked empty.
Of course we also did our landscape thing. And we also got some great sunrise shots. But from time to time we needed to get back to the ghost towns along the coast. And that was, what really stayed in mind, the emptiness in these areas. When you are at sunrise at the top of a mountain, it is not a surprise to be there alone. But not so in the center of a huge beach-town at the middle of the day. So when I think back to that trip, what comes first in my mind, it is the atmosphere of the empty, usually crowded places which used to be stuffed by tourists and which therefore looked as if they really enjoyed to take a deep breath.
